May 14,
2012 "Information
Clearing House"
-- In Robert E. Gamer’s book
“The Developing Nations” is a chapter called “Why Men Do Not
Revolt.” In it Gamer notes that although the oppressed often do
revolt, the object of their hostility is misplaced. They vent
their fury on a political puppet, someone who masks colonial
power, a despised racial or ethnic group or an apostate within
their own political class. The useless battles serve as an
effective mask for what Gamer calls the “patron-client” networks
that are responsible for the continuity of colonial oppression.
The squabbles among the oppressed, the political campaigns
between candidates who each are servants of colonial power,
Gamer writes, absolve the actual centers of power from
addressing the conditions that cause the frustrations of the
people. Inequities, political disenfranchisement and injustices
are never seriously addressed. “The government merely does the
minimum necessary to prevent those few who are prone toward
political action from organizing into politically effective
groups,” he writes.

Gamer and
many others who study the nature of colonial rule offer the best
insights into the functioning of our corporate state. We have
been, like nations on the periphery of empire, colonized. We are
controlled by tiny corporate entities that have no loyalty to
the nation and indeed in the language of traditional patriotism
are traitors. They strip us of our resources, keep us
politically passive and enrich themselves at our expense. The
mechanisms of control are familiar to those whom the
Martinique-born French psychiatrist and writer Frantz Fanon
called “the wretched of the earth,” including African-Americans.
The colonized are denied job security. Incomes are reduced to
subsistence level. The poor are plunged into desperation. Mass
movements, such as labor unions, are dismantled. The school
system is degraded so only the elites have access to a superior
education. Laws are written to legalize corporate plunder and
abuse, as well as criminalize dissent. And the ensuing fear and
instability—keenly felt this past weekend by the more than
200,000 Americans who lost their unemployment benefits—ensure
political passivity by diverting all personal energy toward
survival. It is an old, old game.

A change
of power does not require the election of a Mitt Romney or a
Barack Obama or a Democratic majority in Congress, or an attempt
to reform the system or electing progressive candidates, but
rather a destruction of corporate domination of the political
process—Gamer’s “patron-client” networks. It requires the
establishment of new mechanisms of governance to distribute
wealth and protect resources, to curtail corporate power, to
cope with the destruction of the ecosystem and to foster the
common good. But we must first recognize ourselves as colonial
subjects. We must accept that we have no effective voice in the
way we are governed. We must accept the hollowness of electoral
politics, the futility of our political theater, and we must
destroy the corporate structure itself.

The danger
the corporate state faces does not come from the poor. The poor,
those Karl Marx dismissed as the
Lumpenproletariat, do not mount revolutions, although they
join them and often become cannon fodder. The real danger to the
elite comes from
déclassé
intellectuals, those educated middle-class men and women who are
barred by a calcified system from advancement. Artists without
studios or theaters, teachers without classrooms, lawyers
without clients, doctors without patients and journalists
without newspapers descend economically. They become, as they
mingle with the underclass, a bridge between the worlds of the
elite and the oppressed. And they are the dynamite that triggers
revolt.

This is
why the Occupy movement frightens the corporate elite. What
fosters revolution is not misery, but the gap between what
people expect from their lives and what is offered. This is
especially acute among the educated and the talented. They feel,
with much justification, that they have been denied what they
deserve. They set out to rectify this injustice. And the longer
the injustice festers, the more radical they become.

The
response of a dying regime—and our corporate regime is
dying—is to employ increasing levels of force, and to foolishly
refuse to ameliorate the chronic joblessness, foreclosures,
mounting student debt, lack of medical insurance and exclusion
from the centers of power. Revolutions are fueled by an inept
and distant ruling class that perpetuates political paralysis.
This ensures its eventual death.

In every
revolutionary movement I covered in Latin America, Africa and
the Middle East, the leadership emerged from déclassé
intellectuals. The leaders were usually young or middle-aged,
educated and always unable to meet their professional and
personal aspirations. They were never part of the power elite,
although often their parents had been. They were conversant in
the language of power as well as the language of oppression. It
is the presence of large numbers of déclassé intellectuals that
makes the uprisings in Spain, Egypt, Greece and finally the
United States threatening to the overlords at Goldman Sachs,
ExxonMobil and JPMorgan Chase. They must face down opponents who
understand, in a way the uneducated often do not, the lies
disseminated on behalf of corporations by the public relations
industry. These déclassé intellectuals, because they are
conversant in economics and political theory, grasp that those
who hold power, real power, are not the elected mandarins in
Washington but the criminal class on Wall Street.

This is
what made
Malcolm X so threatening to the white power structure. He
refused to countenance Martin Luther King’s fiction that white
power and white liberals would ever lift black people out of
economic squalor. King belatedly came to share Malcolm’s view.
Malcolm X named the enemy. He exposed the lies. And until we see
the corporate state, and the games it is playing with us, with
the same kind of clarity, we will be nothing more than useful
idiots.

“This is
an era of hypocrisy,” Malcolm X said. “When white folks pretend
that they want Negroes to be free, and Negroes pretend to white
folks that they really believe that white folks want ’em to be
free, it’s an era of hypocrisy, brother. You fool me and I fool
you. You pretend that you’re my brother and I pretend that I
really believe you believe you’re my brother.”

Those
within a demoralized ruling elite, like characters in a Chekhov
play, increasingly understand that the system that enriches and
empowers them is corrupt and decayed. They become cynical. They
do not govern effectively. They retreat into hedonism. They no
longer believe their own rhetoric. They devote their energies to
stealing and exploiting as much, as fast, as possible. They
pillage their own institutions, as we have seen with the newly
disclosed loss of $2 billion within JPMorgan Chase, the meltdown
of
Chesapeake Energy Corp. or the collapse of Enron and Lehman
Brothers. The elites become cannibals. They consume each other.
This is what happens in the latter stages of all dying regimes.
Louis XIV pillaged his own nobility by revoking
patents of nobility and reselling them. It is what most
corporations do to their shareholders. A dying ruling class, in
short, no longer acts to preserve its own longevity. It becomes
fashionable, even in the rarefied circles of the elite, to
ridicule and laugh at the political puppets that are the public
face of the corporate state.

“Ideas
that have outlived their day may hobble about the world for
years,”
Alexander Herzen wrote, “but it is hard for them ever to
lead and dominate life. Such ideas never gain complete
possession of a man, or they gain possession only of incomplete
people."

This loss
of faith means that when it comes time to use force, the elites
employ it haphazardly and inefficiently, in large part because
they are unsure of the loyalty of the foot soldiers on the
streets charged with carrying out repression.

Revolutions take time. The American Revolution began with
protests against the Stamp Act of 1765 but did not erupt until a
decade later. The 1917 revolution in Russia started with a dress
rehearsal in 1905. The most effective revolutions, including the
Russian Revolution, have been largely nonviolent. There are
always violent radicals who carry out bombings and
assassinations, but they hinder, especially in the early stages,
more than help revolutions. The anarchist
Peter
Kropotkin during the Russian Revolution condemned the
radical terrorists, asserting that they only demoralized and
frightened away the movement’s followers and discredited
authentic anarchism.

Radical
violent groups cling like parasites to popular protests. The
Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, the Weather
Underground, the Red Brigades and the Symbionese Liberation Army
arose in the ferment of the 1960s. Violent radicals are used by
the state to justify harsh repression. They scare the mainstream
from the movement. They thwart the goal of all revolutions,
which is to turn the majority against an isolated and
discredited ruling class. These violent fringe groups are
seductive to those who yearn for personal empowerment through
hyper-masculinity and violence, but they do little to advance
the cause. The primary role of radical extremists, such as
Maximilien Robespierre and Vladimir Lenin, is to hijack
successful revolutions. They unleash a reign of terror,
primarily against fellow revolutionaries, which often outdoes
the repression of the old regime. They often do not play much of
a role in building a revolution.

The power
of the Occupy movement is that it expresses the widespread
disgust with the elites, and the deep desire for justice and
fairness that is essential to all successful revolutionary
movements. The Occupy movement will change and mutate, but it
will not go away. It may appear to make little headway, but this
is less because of the movement’s ineffectiveness and more
because decayed systems of power have an amazing ability to
perpetuate themselves through habit, routine and inertia. The
press and organs of communication, along with the anointed
experts and academics, tied by money and ideology to the elites,
are useless in dissecting what is happening within these
movements. They view reality through the lens of their corporate
sponsors. They have no idea what is happening.

Dying
regimes are chipped away slowly and imperceptibly. The
assumptions and daily formalities of the old system are
difficult for citizens to abandon, even when the old system is
increasingly hostile to their dignity, well-being and survival.
Supplanting an old faith with a new one is the silent, unseen
battle of all revolutionary movements. And during the slow
transition it is almost impossible to measure progress.

“Sometimes
people hold a core belief that is very strong,” Fanon wrote in
“Black Skin, White Masks.” “When they are presented with
evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot
be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely
uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so
important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize,
ignore and even deny anything that doesn’t fit in with the core
belief.”

The end of
these regimes comes when old beliefs die and the organs of
security, especially the police and military, abandon the elites
and join the revolutionaries. This is true in every successful
revolution. It does not matter how sophisticated the repressive
apparatus. Once those who handle the tools of repression become
demoralized, the security and surveillance state is impotent.
Regimes, when they die, are like a great ocean liner sinking in
minutes on the horizon. And no one, including the purported
leaders of the opposition, can predict the moment of death.
Revolutions have an innate, mysterious life force that defies
comprehension. They are living entities.

The
defection of the security apparatus is often done with little or
no violence, as I witnessed in Eastern Europe in 1989 and as was
also true in 1979 in Iran and in 1917 in Russia. At other times,
when it has enough residual force to fight back, the dying
regime triggers a violent clash as it did in the American
Revolution when soldiers and officers in the British army,
including George Washington, rebelled to raise the Continental
Army. Violence also characterized the 1949 Chinese revolution
led by Mao Zedong. But even revolutions that turn violent
succeed, as Mao conceded, because they enjoy popular support and
can mount widespread protests, strikes, agitation, revolutionary
propaganda and acts of civil disobedience. The object is to try
to get there without violence. Armed revolutions, despite what
the history books often tell us, are tragic, ugly, frightening
and sordid affairs. Those who storm Bastilles, as the Polish
dissident Adam Michnik wrote, “unwittingly build new ones.” And
once revolutions turn violent it becomes hard to speak of
victors and losers.

A
revolution has been unleashed across the globe. This revolution,
a popular repudiation of the old order, is where we should
direct all our energy and commitment. If we do not topple the
corporate elites the ecosystem will be destroyed and massive
numbers of human beings along with it. The struggle will be
long. There will be times when it will seem we are going
nowhere. Victory is not inevitable. But this is our best and
only hope. The response of the corporate state will ultimately
determine the parameters and composition of rebellion. I pray we
replicate the 1989 nonviolent revolutions that overthrew the
communist regimes in Eastern Europe. But this is not in my hands
or yours. Go ahead and vote this November. But don’t waste any
more time or energy on the presidential election than it takes
to get to your polling station and pull a lever for a
third-party candidate—just enough to register your obstruction
and defiance—and then get back out onto the street. That is
where the question of real power is being decided.

Chris
Hedges writes a regular column for
Truthdig.com.
Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly
two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times.